“So, you don’t want to die?” I asked Zoltan Istvan, then the Transhumanist candidate for president, as we sat in the lobby of the University of Baltimore one day last fall.

“No,” he said, assuredly. “Never.”

Istvan, an atheist who physically resembles the pure-hearted hero of a Soviet children’s book, explained that his life is awesome. In the future, it will grow awesomer still, and he wants to be the one to decide when it ends. Defying aging was the point of his presidential campaign, the slogan of which could have been “Make Death Optional for Once.” To (literally) drive the point home, he circled the nation in the “Immortality Bus,” a brown bus spray-painted to look like a coffin.

He knew he’d lose, of course, but he wanted his candidacy to promote the cause of transhumanism—the idea that technology will allow humans to break free of their physical and mental limitations. His platform included, in part, declaring aging a disease. He implanted a chip in his hand so he could wave himself through his front door, and he wants to get his kids chipped, too. He’d be surprised, he told me, if soon “we don’t start merging our children with machines.” He’d like to replace his limbs with bionics so he can throw perfectly in water polo. Most of all, he wants to stick around for a couple centuries to see it all happen, perhaps joining a band or becoming a professional surfer, a long white beard trailing in his wake.

Istvan made his fortunes in the real-estate business, but in 2003, he was working as a reporter for National Geographic in Vietnam when he almost tripped a landmine. The experience shook him so badly he quit journalism and devoted his life to transhumanism. “I thought, ‘death is horrible,’” he told me. “How can we get around it?”

But his central goal—pushing the human lifespan far beyond the record 122 years and possibly into eternity—is one shared by many futurists in Silicon Valley and beyond. Investor Peter Thiel, who sees death as “the great enemy” of man, is writing checks to researchers like Cynthia Kenyon, who doubled the life-spans of worms through gene-hacking, as the Washington Post reported last April. Oracle founder Larry Ellison has thrown hundreds of millions toward anti-aging research, according to Inc magazine, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the Google subsidiary Calico specifically with the goal of “curing death.” Under President Donald Trump, the quest for immortality might pick up steam: Among the candidates he is reportedly considering to head the Food and Drug Administration is Jim O’Neill, who sits on the board of the anti-aging SENS Research Foundation.

How would immortality change the way we live?

Some life-extension endeavors are already here. Several companies already offer cryogenic freezing to people who wish to have their dead bodies cooled with liquid nitrogen and stored for centuries, with the hope that new medical technologies will by then be available to re-animate them. A British teenager who sued for the right to be cryogenically frozen after her death from cancer in October now floats in frosty slumber in a Michigan cryostat facility.

Meanwhile, scientists in California are expected to launch a clinical trial in which participants will have their blood “cleaned” of age-related proteins, the Guardian reported, with the goal of helping them live longer and healthier lives. A drug called rapamycin, which extended the lives of mice by a quarter, is also being tested. The thinking is, “if we figure out what chemical event signals to the body that it’s time to wrap things up,” said Sheldon Solomon, a psychology professor at Skidmore College, “you could be at a certain age for a long time.”

The billionaire technologists’ obsession with living forever can approach a sort of parody. Oracle’s Ellison once said, “Death makes me very angry"—suggesting this pillar of nature is just another consumer pain-point to be relieved with an app.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it can be. Let’s say human lives will soon get radically longer—or even become unending. The billionaires will get their way, and death will become optional.

If we really are on the doorstep of radical longevity, it’s worth considering how it will change human society. With no deadline, will we still be motivated to finish things? (As a writer, I assure you this is difficult.) Or will we while away our endless days, amusing ourselves to—well, the Process Formerly Known as Death—while we overpopulate the planet? Will Earth become a paradise of eternally youthful artists, or a hellish, depleted nursing home? The answers depend on, well, one’s opinion about the meaning of life.

I didn’t realize how much mainstream support there was for eternal life until I had dinner with a friend who, it’s worth noting, is even more traditional than I am—he’s not even on Twitter.

“I interviewed this guy who wants to live forever,” I said. “Isn’t that wild?”

“What do you mean?” my friend asked. “You don’t want to live forever?”

If he never died, he explained, he could finally pursue all the hobbies and dreams he’s never had time for. Even alternate careers, like architecture. (He’s a lawyer.) He’s never quite understood calculus, but with all the time in the world, he could master it. He would take a sabbatical every four years to travel the world.

I’ll admit, his passion for a long life of solving integrals and kayaking through rainforests did drag me closer to the immortality corner. Even if I extended my life by just a few years, I could finally get to the bottom of my Netflix and Pocket queues.

And I had been silently dismissing life-extension enthusiasts’ spiels about seeing their great-great-grandkids grow up, since I don’t have kids and probably never will.

But—but—if I was certain I could stay sharp and energetic well into my 90s, maybe my stance on motherhood would change. I wouldn’t worry so much about kids cutting into my productivity if my ability to produce was limitless. Sure, I’d probably have a few sleepless nights and groggy days in the early years. (Unless, of course, Silicon Valley really gets cracking on those robot wet-nurses.) But once Olga Jr. was out of the house and working as a Martian News correspondent or whatever, I could more than make up for lost time.

This feeling of abundant possibility is one of the chief motivations of the pro-longevity crowd. “Projects and ambitions like mastering every musical instrument in the orchestra, writing a book in each of all the major languages, planting a new garden and seeing it mature, teaching one’s great-great-grandchildren how to fish, traveling to Alpha Centauri, or just seeing history unfold over a few hundred years are not realistic: there is simply not enough time to achieve them given current life expectancy,” wrote Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher and grand-daddy of life-extension (so to speak), with fellow philosopher Rebecca Roache in 2008. But, they continue, “if we could reasonably expect from an early age to live indefinitely, we could embark on projects designed to keep us occupied for hundreds or thousands of years.”

Among the many downsides of dying is the prospect of never reaching one’s full potential. Right now, I’m projected to die when I’m about 82. But what if it takes me until I'm 209 to write the great American blog post?

Still, a common fear about life in our brave, new undying world is that it will just be really boring, says S. Matthew Liao, director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University. Life, Liao explained, is like a party—it has a start and end time. “We get excited because the party’s going on for an hour, and we don’t want to miss it. We try to make the most of it while we’re there.”

“But imagine there’s a party that doesn’t end,” he continued. “It would be bad, because you’d think, ‘I could go there tomorrow, or a month from now.’ There’s no urgency to go to the party anymore.”

The Epicureans of ancient Greece thought about it similarly, Solomon said. They saw life as a feast: “If you were at a meal, you’d be satiated, then stuffed, then repulsed,” he said. “Part of what makes each of us uniquely valuable is the great story. We have a plot, and ultimately it concludes.”

Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, explains that people make sense of their lives through narrative arcs. Without an ending, there can’t be a story. How would we process life events differently, given infinite do-overs? For example, because we have a vague sense that people are supposed to die at roughly 80, we now grieve people who die at 20 more than those who die at 78. But if people began living to 500, that might change, McAdams pointed out. There might be far more tragedy in the world if we’re mourning the loss of every 90-year-old the way we now would a child. “We’re just so much trained by evolution and culture to know that our life is going to be relatively short and constrained,” he said, “and to be somewhat cautious so we don’t screw it all up.” (Of course, if technology also makes us smarter as it makes us live longer, who knows what types of new arcs we’ll construct for ourselves.)

Bostrom dismisses the thought that there’s something about impending death that adds meaning or motivation to our days. “It often seems the young are most energetically pursuing different kinds of activities, and the closer you get to death, the more people lean back,” he told me. “Partly it’s due to their reduced energy and health.”

Which, of course, he hopes we can fix.

Once living longer becomes possible, who will get to do it? Istvan believes life-extension technology should be available to everyone, not just the wealthy. He supports a universal health-care system with life extension as one of its core benefits. (Health-care costs wouldn’t spiral out of control, he and some others think, because the longer-living humans would also be healthier. Istvan plans to pay for this universal Zoltancare by selling government land in the western United States.)

Others believe that soon after life-extending technology becomes available, the price will drop rapidly and it will become attainable by most—just as occurred with personal computers.

“But the worry in the short-term, is what happens? The rich could get richer and the poor could get poorer,” Liao said. Because the rich could afford to extend their lives first, and life-extenders could amass more resources over the course of their long lives, income inequality could grow even more profound.

Then again, that’s how things work now. “If someone comes up with a new cancer drug, we don’t say ‘let’s not use it until every person has access to it,’” Bostrom told me. “By that logic, we should stop kidney transplants.”

Even if eternal life gets equitably distributed, there’s still the problem of what to do with all the excess centenarians running around. Eventually, we’re going to run out of room here on Earth. One solution would be to dramatically curtail reproduction, focusing instead on the health and longevity of those already here. As the philosopher Jan Narveson put it, “we are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people.” That might mean, though, that you won’t have a great-great-great-grandkid to attend the dance-recitals of.

There is a chance that worrying less about death might short-circuit our naturally tribalist natures, easing resource-allocation issues in the process. Solomon, the Skidmore psychologist, researches terror management theory, which suggests the knowledge of our eventual demise makes people psychologically retrench. Being reminded of death causes study subjects to adhere more firmly to their existing worldview, mistrust outsiders more, and even to, ahem, support charismatic leaders who may not be very qualified. So in some ways, eliminating the prospect of death might make us want to ratify all the climate treaties and equitably divvy up the world’s food supply.

... That is, of course, unless immortality has the opposite effect, making us paranoid that we’ll die too soon for no reason. After all, even if we can eliminate aging, we can’t eliminate chance. “Let’s say you expected to live to 5,000 and your head’s being frozen, there’s a power outage, and it turns into a pile of mush,” Solomon said. “We might become even more hyper-vigilant.”

Liao and others think one answer to the overcrowding problem might be interstellar space travel—which, they assume, will be invented by then. When Earth turns into an overpopulated dump, Liao says, the immortal can just hop between planets.

I told him an eternity spent on Venus among youthful billionaires does not appeal to me.

“What if all your friends go to Venus?” he asked. He offered an earthly comparison: “You’ll be here while everyone’s in Brooklyn?”

(Everyone’s already in Brooklyn, though, and I’m still here in Northern Virginia.)

Space travel is also how Liao envisions us overcoming the boredom problem. Right now, the journey between solar systems is too long for a human to accomplish in a normal lifespan, but with life extension, that won’t be a concern anymore. We won’t run out of things to do, the thinking goes, because there will always be another planet to explore. We’ll all cheerfully grow old aboard our interstellar minivan.

And in general, Liao explained, humans engage in lots of pleasures that aren’t repetitive, like forming new relationships, making music, learning things, and experiencing natural wonders.

“If that’s what human existence is about, and you can continue to do that, why not be able to live longer?” he asked me.

“I guess I do like hiking,” I said.

“You might even enjoy hiking on Mars,” he said.

Eh, don’t push it.

* * *

The somber side to the debate is whether life extension will cause us to lose our appreciation for natural human vulnerability. In other words, society might begin to preference those who have swallowed anti-aging drugs, making un-enhanced humans a sort of rotting underclass.

Parents who have babies with mild disabilities might be blamed for “not doing Gattaca,” as Liao puts it. (Istvan’s platform reads, “Develop science and technology to be able to eliminate all disabilities in humans who have them.”) We’ll have to wrestle with whether those who don’t take fountain-of-youth pills should be charged more for health insurance. Worse yet, by jetting off to a new planet, the enhanced and immortal could abandon Earth to mere mortals, the cruelest and most extreme form of segregation.

Life-extensionists’ zeal for perfect cells does, to some, sound like an invective against uniqueness. That’s what Melinda Hall, a philosophy professor at Stetson University and author of a recent book about transhumanism, takes issue with. “People with disability are saying, ‘this is a primary part of my identity,’” she told me, “so when you’re saying you want to get rid of disability, it sounds genocidal.”

Istvan dismisses disability-rights advocates as a fringe minority, saying “I would bet my arm that the great majority of disabled people will be very happy when transhumanist technology gives them the opportunity to fulfill their potential.” (Betting your arm is, of course, no biggie when you can just get a bionic one.)

In general, Hall said, the transhumanists have the wrong idea about the problems facing humanity. “People are going to be starving and dying, but we’re going to build a colony on Mars?” she said, “That’s going to cost billions of dollars, and I think that should be spent somewhere else.”

Of course, that won’t stop the billionaires from following their dreams. Perhaps our best hope is that on the path to immortality, they’ll discover something useful to broader swathes of society. Metformin, an old diabetes drug recently shown to extend the life of animals, is now being tested as an anti-aging pill. If it really does allow people to stay healthy in old age, some would regard it a “public health revolution”—even if it fails to help Peter Thiel meet his cyborg-descendants in 2450.

In that way, today’s life extensionists might follow the proud tradition of other explorers who shot for another galaxy and ended up straddling the moon. “The alchemists write about trying to find elixirs of gold and immortality. They never find that, but they discovered chemistry,” Solomon said. “Ponce de Leon never found the fountain of youth, but he found Florida.”

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.